Adrian Boult

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Sir Adrian Cedric Boult (8 April 1889 - 22 February 1983) was an English conductor. Boult was born in Chester to a comfortably middle-class household and educated at Westminster School (which has named its music centre after him) and Christ Church, Oxford. As a schoolboy he was introduced to the world of music by a family friend, Frank Schuster, who was a friend of Edward Elgar and introduced the young Boult to the composer. He completed his musical education at the Leipzig Conservatory where he learnt to conduct by watching the eminent Hungarian conductor Arthur Nikisch. He sang in choral festivals and at the Leeds Festival of 1913, where he went to watch Nikisch conduct, and made the acquaintance of George Butterworth and other British composers. During World War I he worked at the War Office, and while still there in 1918 planned a series of concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra, which included several important recent British works: Gustav Holst's The Planets, of which he gave the first (private) performance, A London Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams, of which he gave the first performance of the revised version, and Elgar's Second Symphony which had fallen into neglect. Elgar wrote to him and said he felt sure the future of his music was safe in Boult's hands. In this way Boult laid the foundations for a long career as a champion of 20th-century English music. As one example, Vaughan Williams dedicated Job, A Masque for Dancing to Boult in the mid-1930's, sever

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